


To my most beloved

by hundredamages



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel
Genre: Angst, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Bucky Barnes is grieving, Grief/Mourning, Lots of Angst, Mention of Death, Steve Rogers is dead, i just like to suffer, implied mental health issues, post Endgame, yes this is a letter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:20:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24077368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hundredamages/pseuds/hundredamages
Summary: I know I wasn’t worth all this, Steve. I know I wasn’t worth all of you. Only tiny bits, shared silent looks and vain touches. I was worth the deepest hours of your darkest nights when she was worth all your mornings and brightest days. Love works in the strangest of ways, and perhaps ours wasn’t destined to thrive. I know I’ve borne it more than you have, and they say there is the one who loves more and the one who is more loved.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	To my most beloved

**Author's Note:**

> Bucky writes a letter to Steve one month after Steve's funeral. I wrote that at 4am and I still don't know why. Also english is not my mother language so there will be mistakes. Enjoy anyway, if you can.

My most beloved,

I am not the one made to handle words, you were. I don’t even know if I should be doing this, trying to put together my thoughts to explain what is going on. Writing all this is something I’ve been trying to do for the last couple of days, but it all just felt too heavy. And too soon, maybe. Too much. 

It has been a month since the last time I saw you alive. God, why do I have to start everything with harsh and merciless words? It is easier, I guess, to write down the inexplicable void by using the pain. It might be the closest thing to what I’m feeling. Or perhaps it is the absence of your soul that makes everything so quiet yet so loud. I don’t know, I wanted to write down unsaid things, to act as if you would one day read them all. I wanted to tell you all of this, for the first and last time. 

A month. It’s been a month. A month I spent trying to organize the things that run through my head. You know I’ve always been a thinker. Knew. You knew I’ve always been a thinker. And I’ve had time to think. About you, about the war, about the things I never said and those I should have kept quiet. There is no good time to lay down what I’ve been meaning to tell you. There won’t ever be a good time. Not anymore. Maybe I should have done it while I still could. Or perchance it’s better that I never did. I guess I will never know. 

They asked me to make a speech at your funeral. I didn’t want to, at first. You know that I’m not comfortable with big crowds. Knew. You knew I’ve never been comfortable with big crowds. You were the star, the one people listened to, with the way your voice made the world go quiet, ruthlessly. How could I ever honor that? No words were great enough, strong enough, to talk about your soul and the way it was a part of mine. It was almost terrible, to be listened to like that. The way all these teary eyes were stuck on me. They knew I’m the one who has known you the best. They were waiting for words that would describe the man you were with perfect rhymes and delicate syllables. It was none of that. I am not good with words and God knows I can never use them right when it comes to you. You are, were, a riddle that never allowed itself to be solved. I didn’t know where to start, or even how to start. So I guess I lied. Not about you, of course. I could never lie about the one you were. About the way your body moved harshly along the lines of my skin, or the smile you gave me when you felt like crying. I would never lie about it. I just never said these things out loud. It was shared moments of peacefulness, of tenderness and this feeling of warmth, of being welcomed wherever you stood. You could never disappoint me, I thought once. You were my beginning and my end and everything in between. You were never a precise moment, hour, minute. You were standing and would always be standing. You were an eternity, stretching bellow my reason and my consciousness. You were there, here, now and then, and there would be no end as long as you would still stand. Choosing the words to explain such things was damn near impossible. 

I said you were my friend. I looked at you coffin and hated the words that came out of my mouth. A friend. You were never a friend, Steve. You’ve never been a friend. How could you be just that, a friend, a warm embrace or a reassuring hand. I looked at your coffin and it was the feeling of losing my own self, again and again and again. I swear I died, the day you left. And I kept dying over and over again, as they lowered what was left of you into the ground. I swear I disappeared, the day you died. And people were crying and I didn’t cry. You were the only one worthy of seeing my tears, so what was the point. You weren’t there, Steve, and you never will be. I didn’t cry when I left the graveyard or when Sam would call me in the middle of the night desperate because he misses you or when I would wake up drenched in sweat after dreaming of your death. I didn’t cry when you left and I didn’t cry when you died and I didn’t cry when I realized you were gone. For who can be crying over the one who left them. 

“He loved you, you know”, Sam said, one morning, while we were drinking coffee, three days after burying your body. I didn’t answer. What was there to say, other than “no, he didn’t”. I think I shook my head and he must have noticed. Sam always notices. He noticed then how my hands began to tremble, or how my eyes would linger over the emptiness. Over your absence, probably, or the thought of you standing before me. He noticed how, from then, I lost a part of myself - _he is half my soul, has the poets say_ , right?- He notices how I sigh slowly, now, as if there was a weight all over me. He notices, but he says nothing. He knows that I don’t want to speak and that I need to process things, and he knows that because you told him. You prepared him for your death. You must have told him to never push me into talking, to never ask too many questions, to never try to reach out before I do. You must have told him how I would shut down and probably tell him to go, to leave or simply to shut up. You prepared him for your death. Him, and not me. Why not, Steve. Why didn’t you talk to me, tell me I was gonna be alright, that this feeling wouldn’t last forever. At least, I could have said goodbye. You didn’t even let me say goodbye. 

Sam told me again, later that day, that you loved me. “You were everything to him” were his exact words. I didn’t answer. Was I everything to you, Steve? Why didn’t you tell me? Was it so hard to face me in those final moments? Did you feel like a traitor? Did you feel guilty? God, I knew you loved her and you never stopped loving her. And I should have known better and I should have kept myself from burying under my skin. I know I wasn’t worth all this, Steve. I know I wasn’t worth all of you. Only tiny bits, shared silent looks and vain touches. I was worth the deepest hours of your darkest nights when she was worth all your mornings and brightest days. Love works in the strangest of ways, and perhaps ours wasn’t destined to thrive. I know I’ve borne it more than you have, and they say there is the one who loves more and the one who is loved more. 

It’s been a month, and I’m trying to forgive. I hate myself for hating you, I really do. The dead shouldn’t be hated upon. Especially not you, _a symbol to the nation, a hero to the world_. But to me you were just Steve, and Steve was what I used to call home, and even when I had nothing I had you. Didn’t you see that? That you were all I could have died for and all I would have saved if the world was to end? I never said it out loud, I know. I never said I loved you and I know you wanted me to. Maybe it would have made you stay. But didn’t you know? Our love language was one from the books, from the unsaid and the unspoken. It was made of gestures and kisses, it was made of your fingers tracing my bones and my eyes drinking the moonlight on your skin. I know I didn’t say anything, but weren’t my eyes enough? I looked at you and I know it must have felt almost unbearable, being looked at like that. If I loved you? Of course I did. And I still do. And I always will. And this might be my biggest tragedy, that I will never love again the way I loved you. With all my soul and all my memories and every inch of my skin and every moment of my day and with every breath I took and every tear I shed. I will never love again the way I loved you. I gave you my life. What more is there to give? 

It’s been a month. I’m trying, I really am. But your absence is a strange feeling. I’ve been used to you. You were an evidence, a presence that never faded, a silence that meant the world. You were there and it seemed like you would always be. Nothing remains but the flicker of your reassuring touch. I stubble upon things, in my apartment, that remind me of you. A picture, a forgotten item, the mug you always used to pick or the chair you sat in. But I know it’s nothing compared to what’s coming. Compared to Spring. The season that reminds me of you, as I told you so, once. “I remind you of spring? That’s so soft of you” you said, with a smirk. I laughed a bit, and told you it was because of the way the sun would light up the streets, low but flamboyant, and how everything would turn bright during the late hours of the afternoon. You frowned. You didn’t get it. “I just think it’s beautiful” I remember saying. Then you looked at me with bravery in your eyes. You kissed me, I guess. Or maybe I kissed you. That was my way of telling you, then, that I loved you. You reminded me of spring and the sun and the soft wind and we were at peace. But in the end you still left. 

I know I wasn’t enough. I’ve come to terms with the idea that I couldn’t make you stay. Still, sometimes, I can’t help myself but think of what it could have been. We were given a second chance at life, at love, at friendship and happiness. So I wonder, in the late hours of the night, what it could have been. What we could have been if you had decided that I was enough. Maybe it would have been just like before. Before the war, before all this. Before I lost myself and you had to bring it back to me. And maybe this is the problem, right? That you had to save me and you thought you couldn’t do it anymore. Maybe you couldn’t recognize me and that’s what made you go. I know I’m not the one I used to be. Hell, Steve, I know it better than anyone. I know I lost that little something in my eyes that made all the ladies and the boys look at me. I know I smile less, I frown more, I lose my trail of thoughts sometimes, staring at the void. I know I look absent and it takes time for me to handle everything. I know. I know I’ve changed and I know you probably hated it. Maybe if I wasn’t so different you would have stayed. But they tore me apart in ways you couldn’t imagine. I never spoke about it. Never wanted to remember. And I never wanted you to know about all this, to bury these memories, that belong to me alone, under your eyes. I didn’t want you to know. I wanted you to think of me as I was back then, when your nose would turn red around May, when I had to hold your body during the cold winter nights, when you were a walking bomb, ready to explode and disappear into the sound of chaos. When you fought battles you couldn’t win but went in anyway. When you were up before me, always, even though you were sick and trembling in my arms just the night before. The feeling of being safe, somehow, when you were around, even though God knows anybody could have killed you with a punch at the right place. I don’t know, I think it was your bravery that always amazed me. How your body was a disaster but your mind made everything work out, always. Even if I had not been there you would have survived. I’m not so sure if it’s true, the other way around. You were made for war and battles and I wasn’t. In the end war killed us both. Heavy breaths and too many unwanted fights destroyed our bound souls. Hundreds of years drowning in hate. In blood, in fears, in tears and deaths. We’re the ones that always seem to die.

I asked Sam, you know. I asked him why he thinks you did it. “Did what?”. He was perplexed. “Leave us”, I remember replying. There was a silence, the kind that lingers for too long and doesn’t ever seem to end. He didn’t want to lie. He couldn’t lie to me, he knew that. Nobody lies to me when it comes to you, they know your life was mine’s best part. He searched his words, I saw him struggling. But Sam is good with words, maybe as much as you were. “I guess he never knew how to forget the past. He could never stop himself from missing it. He wasn’t like you, Bucky. He wasn’t strong” I closed my eyes. “He was strong.” I answered, in a whisper. “But not enough” was all he said before putting a hand on my shoulder.

I don’t think I am strong, Steve. I never asked to be strong. I never asked for the painful mornings and the fragile mind and shivering skin. I had to be strong. You know, with everything that happened. I couldn’t allow myself to show that, deep down, my entire self was torn. Muscles rip apart, bones break, eyes water. My body is painful, always has been since the fall. It doesn’t want to let me forget that I’m not supposed to be here. Fuck, Steve I’m supposed to be six feet under. I fell and I shouldn’t be alive. I fell and you saw me and you knew. I was dead to you and I should have stayed dead. It would have been easier, simpler, less chaotic and desperate. I’m sorry it happened. The fall, the breaking, the grieving, the remembering. Having to find me again when I couldn’t even begin to comprehend who you were. Maybe you never forgave me for it. I don’t know, I’m just wondering that maybe, just maybe, you did think it was my fault. All the killings and the deaths. After all, I did it. I didn’t have a choice but I did it and you knew. Maybe it doesn’t make sense. Maybe maybe maybe. I’ll never know, that’s the irony. 

This feeling won’t last forever, I hope. Perhaps it will, now that you’re gone. Perhaps, after all, it’s not about why you didn’t stay, but why you went back. It’s not about why you left but what made you leave. Maybe it’s not about me, or her, but about you. I don’t know. I never will. I don’t think you told Sam why you went back. I don’t even know if you knew yourself. A feeling, maybe. An undying need to find yourself again. The constant feeling of not belonging. A longing for what was left behind. The never-ending ache of missing the past. I felt it too, countless times. The need to bring it all back. But I can’t return there. Not now, not ever. I almost have it here. Almost. The sense of belonging, of feeling at peace. 

I’ll find it, eventually. 

I just wish you could have found it too. 

**Author's Note:**

> I know there is a lot of anger in this but I truly believe that Bucky felt betrayed, even though he understood why Steve left to go back in time. Marvel give this poor man a break Bucky is tired.


End file.
